Mask Market b-16 Page 13

  You don’t have to be a celebrity to make the list. There are humans who worship property rights. Their property. Some of them see therapists with their “abandonment issues.” Others visit a gun shop.

  All stalkers have one thing in common: a profound, overwhelming, all-encompassing sense of entitlement. Leaving them is worse than an affront; it’s an act of deadly aggression, a threat to their core. Punishment is required.

  Most people who flee don’t have the resources to really get gone. They have to work for a living. Open a bank account. Rent an apartment. Get a driver’s license.

  Ex-cons talk about “getting off paper,” meaning no wants, no warrants, no detainers, no parole, no probation. But the one paper nobody ever gets off is a stalker’s “to do” list.

  For some disturbos, the relationship they think was “broken off” never existed in the first place. A true erotomaniac can construct the illusion of reciprocated love out of a celebrity’s autograph, a form-letter answer to fan mail, a “shared moment” during a public appearance. Or from secret messages the victim sends in a magazine interview, a line he writes in a novel, a gesture with his hand during a TV show. Messages only the “special one” can decode.

  There’s nothing so dangerous as an armed narcissist, but the gun’s no good without an address. That’s why the highest level of threat assessment is reserved for the ones protection experts call “travelers.” Some stalkers get their rocks off writing letters; travelers always deliver their messages in person.

  The search services never ask customers what they intend to do with the information they buy. After all, people are entitled to their privacy.

  “W hen I was in high school, girls got a name for what they’d do.

  Or wouldn’t do,” Loyal said.

  “It was a small town?”

  “That’s right. But I don’t see why that would make any difference. When I was in school, if you ever went all the way with a boy, just once, every other boy in school would expect you to do the same with him.”

  “How old were you when you figured that out?”

  “I didn’t have to figure it out; it all got explained to me.”

  “By your mother?”

  “Nope. Not my father, either. They didn’t talk about things like that. It was my brother, my big brother. Speed told me—”

  “Your brother’s name was Speed?”

  “Yes, it was,” she said, hands on hips, as if daring me to make something of it.

  I held up my hands in surrender.

  “Speed told me how boys talk. See, I always thought it was just girls who did that. I remember him saying it: ‘There’s some things I can’t protect you from, sis. Talk like that, once it gets out of the bottle, you can never put it back in.’ I never forgot that.”

  “He was a good protector, your brother?”

  “Oh, he was just the best! Some of the boys I went to school with, they could get a little rough, be too free with their hands, especially when they’d had some liquor in them. But none of them wanted to get Speed mad. He wasn’t the biggest boy in the school, but he was just so…willing. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Sure. I came up with guys like that. You might be able to beat them, but they’d make you do it. Cost you something to try, too.”

  “That’s him exactly!” she said, clapping her hands. “It’s like you knew him.”

  “Maybe I will, someday.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Speed’s gone. A year after I left, he was killed in an accident over to the mill. About killed my mother, too. She didn’t ever seem to get over him dying. She kept saying it wasn’t right—the parent is supposed to go first.

  “In the beginning, she was just plain mad. Mad at everyone and everything. Stopped going to church. Told the preacher if taking Speed was part of God’s plan she didn’t want any part of it. Or Him. Then, one night, she went to sleep and never woke up. Never let anyone say you can’t die of a broken heart, Lew. Because my momma did, sure as I’m standing here today.”

  “Didn’t you want to go—”

  “Home? Well, sure, I did. I mean, I did go, for Speed’s funeral, and to stay with my mother for a bit. But it was her, her and my father, who got me to leave. They said Speed would have wanted me to try. I knew, the minute they said those words, it was true. Speed was always willing, and I had to be, too. Because I loved him so much.”

  “He’d be proud of you, Loyal.”

  “For trying? Yes, I guess he would be. Even if I didn’t succeed, I tried and tried.”

  “You make it sound past-tense, girl.”

  “It kind of is,” she said, as if really considering the idea for the first time. “Remember what I was talking to you about? My apartment?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, that’s kind of my exit line. I am going back home. And I guess I could, you know, just sell out and go. That other plan—the one I told you about?—that’s only a good one if there’s a reason for me to stay.”

  “You mean, like, a part or something?”

  “More like a ‘something,’” she said, looking up at me through the veil of her long lashes.

  “S pring came in like treachery,” the precise-featured man next to me said. We were sitting on an outdoor bench on Central Park West. “It popped up like a mugger out of the dark, pounced, and stole away with the cold. Get it?”

  “Nice,” I said. He was wearing a black quilted jacket, left open to display a turquoise turtleneck jersey over black narrow-cuffed slacks and black slip-ons just a half-glisten less shiny than patent leather. I knew four things about him: he went by “Styx,” he was a writer, and he was plugged into a bunch of data banks.

  The other thing I knew about him didn’t matter to me, and that mattered a lot to him.

  All he knew about me was that I get paid for what I do, and I pay for what I want.

  “You ever hear of Surry, New Hampshire?” he said.

  “No,” I told him. Talking with this guy, the less words the better.

  “There’s no ‘e’ in it. You spell it like it was ‘Furry,’ only with an ‘S’ in front, all right?”

  “Sure.”

  “If there was an ‘e’ there, it would be like those hansom cabs in the park. You know, a ‘surrey with the fringe on top.’”

  “Ah.”

  “It’s not far from Keene…?”

  “Is that anywhere near Hinsdale?”

  “Hinsdale? What’s up there?”

  “Used to be a racetrack. They closed it down a few years back.”

  “You mean, like, for racehorses?”

  “Yeah. Trotters, not Thoroughbreds.”

  “Oh.” He half-yawned. A mugger must have stolen his interest. “Anyway, that’s where your man lives. Surry, New Hampshire.”

  “Preston, that’s a common name. You sure you got the—?”

  “If he’s the same Jeremy Preston who sold the house in Westchester you told me about, he’s the one you want,” the man said, a little huffy that I could be questioning his skills. He’s a very sensitive guy. I guess writers are like that.

  We got up and started walking through the park. He lives on the East Side; we’d part company where the traverse gives you the Fifty-ninth Street option.

  A jogger passed us. He was wearing a white bodysuit with orange fluorescent bands around the sleeves and thighs. On his back was embroidered: “Runner Carries No Cash.”

  “My mistress says to say hello,” the writer said. I guess this was one of those days when he wasn’t allowed to say her name.

  “Back at her.”

  We walked some more, watching spring descend all over the park.

  “I’m working on a novella now,” he said. “I’m calling it ‘Sub Plot.’ What do you think?”

  “Very strong,” I assured him.

  I t took Clarence only a few minutes to computer-map me a route to Surry, New Hampshire. Close to a straight shot: 95 North to New Haven, 91 all the way across
the border into Vermont, take Exit 3, and then follow the directions I had taped to the dashboard.

  I’d be running in the seam—it was too late in the season for the ski crowd, and too early for the foliage freaks. Even at cop-avoidance speeds, probably no more than four hours.

  I would have liked company on the drive, but Beryl’s father had known a man with a different face, and I didn’t want to spook him any more than I had to. Or let him think anybody but me knew his business.

  Once, I would have taken Pansy with me. She loved to ride, and she was a better conversationalist than she looked.

  I walled that one off. Quick, before it took hold. Bad dreams are one thing; somewhere down in that darkness, you know they’re dreams. But invasive memories are ice-pick stabs that bring their own darkness. Waking up won’t help you. The best you can do is hold them off until they get tired and fade. Until the next time.

  I rolled out at four in the morning. Even at that hour, the city’s never empty, but there was nothing you could call “traffic,” and I cruised all the way to the bridge without stopping for anything but the occasional light.

  The Roadrunner was contemptuous of the speed I held her to, the tach loafing at around two grand. I switched between the all-news stations, listening for anything about the investigation into the death of Daniel Parks, but all I heard was the usual putrid stream of packaged press releases, endless sports scores, some breathless celebrity-watch crap, and a lot of commercials.

  I switched to talk radio. People were still foaming at the mouth about some woman in Florida who’d been brain-dead for over a dozen years. She was way past a coma—“persistent vegetative state” is what the doctors called it. A feeding tube in her stomach was all that was keeping her body from rotting—to some, a lifeline; to others, a harpoon in dead flesh. Her husband said she had told him if she was ever in that kind of situation she’d want to go. Her parents said that was all a lie.

  Her husband had the final say, and that probably would have ended it, except that the anti-abortion crowd decided this was some kind of “right to life” issue, and they lit a fire under their lackeys. The governor of Florida—a passionate believer in capital punishment, because that’s what the Bible told him—stuck his God-fearing nose in, personally passing a law that stopped the husband from disconnecting the feeding tube. When the courts said he couldn’t do that, his brother, Big Christian, took over. Once that happened, the same Congress that hasn’t been able to come up with a national health plan in twenty years took about twenty minutes to pass a law that sent the whole thing back to the courts.

  The TV stations had all been running footage of the woman. Her eyes were empty, lips drawn away from her teeth in a permanent rictus her parents said was a smile of grateful love.

  One caller said the husband should be on trial for attempted murder. Another screamed he was a “confessed adulterer,” since he was openly living with another woman. Someone else calmly recited that he was going to get “millions” from the lawsuit over what had made his wife brain-dead in the first place.

  Fair and balanced.

  When she’s finally allowed to go, I figure they’ll fight over the remains. If the parents win, my money’s on cryogenics.

  No matter which station I switched to, there was the same topic. One degenerate said the woman was still smarter than his ex-wife had been—probably had worked on that line for days, in between popping Viagra so he could get his money’s worth out of his porno DVDs. Then there was a panel of medical experts, who went on about “loss of upper-cortical function,” and a bunch of other stuff nobody was listening to or cared about.

  The only honesty I heard was from a brimstone-voiced woman who warned, “When America finally becomes a Christian country, cases like Terri’s won’t be decided in any court. The Lord will rule.”

  I shivered like it was winter inside the car.

  O nce I got onto Route 91, I had to break my vow to stay at the speed limit if I wanted to avoid calling attention to myself. I inserted the Plymouth into a clot of cars and let them pull me along with them. Our pack was running a little over eighty when a red Mustang shot past on the left. The driver gave me a hard look, like he’d just backed me down from a challenge. Probably practiced it in his rearview mirror whenever he was stuck in traffic.

  When I left the highway, I was only about twenty miles from my target. The Plymouth blended right into a thin stream of mixed vehicles, everything from working-class trucks to luxo-SUVs, with a seasoning of anonymous Japanese sedans and the occasional kid’s jacked-up Camaro.

  My ID said I was James Logan, who lived in a building in the Bronx that hadn’t gotten a mail delivery since a drunken squatter kicked over a kerosene heater a few winters back. License, registration, and proof of insurance all matched the plates. Jim Logan had taken early retirement from his job as a manufacturer’s representative, selling restaurant supplies. His hobby was restorations. The Plymouth was a work-in-progress, and now he was looking for an old farmhouse he could bring back to life, too. Friends had told him that southern New Hampshire had a lot of wonderful possibilities, but he preferred to look around on his own first, before dealing with brokers.

  There was snow in the fields, but the roads were crisp and clean. A few flakes may be enough to paralyze cities like Charleston or Atlanta, but up here even a major blizzard wouldn’t slow things down for long. It’s always easier handling what you’re used to—that’s why people with my kind of childhood do so well in prison.

  The town didn’t have a lot of street signs, and I wasn’t carrying a premarked GPS, so I just meandered around, getting a sense of the place as I searched for the address.

  I passed it twice before I pulled over and checked what I had written down. The number matched, but my expectations didn’t. Instead of the semi-mansion and fancy grounds I’d expected—and I’d driven past enough of those to know the little town didn’t lack for upscale housing—it wasn’t a lot more than a cottage, set off to the side of an unpaved driveway.

  I drove back, thinking maybe I’d been looking at a guest house, or some kind of artist’s studio, and the real thing was somewhere behind it. But the only other building I could see as I went up the driveway was a small garage, sided the same as the house, with a matching roof. The house itself was bigger than it had looked from the road, but no more than a couple of thousand square feet, I guessed. If you transplanted the whole thing to Westchester, probably cost you three-quarters of a mil. Up here, maybe a third of that? I didn’t know enough to even guess.

  I parked the Plymouth at the end of the drive, jockeyed it around until it was facing out the way I’d come, and walked across a patch of ground to the front door. Before I could raise my hand to knock, it opened.

  “Yes?” said a gray man. I blinked twice, and the gray man turned into Jeremy Preston. Or whatever was left of him.

  “Mr. Preston,” I said, confidently, “my name is Logan. James Logan. I’m here about a matter my brother handled for you, quite a number of years ago. I’ve driven a long way, and I’d sure appreciate a few moments of your time.”

  “If it’s about the business, that was closed when—”

  “No, sir,” I said, politely. “It was a private matter.”

  He stared into my face, nakedly searching. Came up empty.

  “Look, Mr…. Logan, is it? I don’t know any—”

  “My brother’s name was Burke, sir. And the matter he handled for you concerned your daughter. Do you think we could…?”

  I nside, the cottage looked like a lot more money than it had from the road. The peaked ceiling must have gone up fifteen feet, with massive beams running across; a series of skylights cut into one side flooded the room with pale northern sun. The furniture looked like it was wall-to-wall antiques, but, for all I know about stuff like that, it could have been a collection of three-dollar bills. A serious-looking woodstove occupied one corner, the cast-iron ducting showing it was used to actually heat the house. The stone firepl
ace that took up most of one wall must have been put there for entertainment.

  “Coffee?” he asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Tea? Hot chocolate?”

  I could see he wasn’t going to engage unless I gave him time to put himself together. “Hot chocolate sounds great, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” I told him.

  “Nothing to it,” Preston said, leaving me alone in the living room. I could hear the sounds of glass and metal in what I guessed had to be the kitchen.

  Enough time passed for him to have called the cops, if that was what he was going to do. But I didn’t think so; he wouldn’t have let me in if he didn’t want to hear what I had to say first.

  “How’s that?” he said, handing me a heavy white china mug.

  “Smells perfect.”

  “It’s store-bought,” he said apologetically, as if I had been expecting him to produce something more authentic.

  “Just about have to be, right? I’ve never been up here before, but I can’t believe the cocoa bean would survive this climate.”

  “Yes,” he said, seating himself in a rocking chair covered by a white horse-blanket with red diagonal stripes. “Now, can you explain the whole thing to me, please? I’m a bit confused as to what you’re doing here”—smiling to take the edge off his words.

  “My brother and I had different fathers,” I told him. “His name was Burke.”

  The expression on his face told me he was ahead of me, but I went on, a man explaining his mission.

  “We weren’t close,” I said. “Different lives, different coasts. So, when I learned I had been appointed the executor of his will, I admit I was surprised. I flew in from Portland—Oregon, not Maine—and the lawyer who had handled the will gave me an envelope. Inside, there was a list of my brother’s cases—apparently, he was some sort of private detective—and, well, I suppose you’d call them a list of last requests. Things he wanted me to do.”

  “He wanted you to finish his cases?”

  “Nothing like that,” I said, smiling to show how absurd the idea was. “I’m not a private detective, I’m a small businessman. Very small—I own a motor court on the coast, me and my wife. What Burke wanted me to do was, well—I’m not sure how to say this—kind of, maybe, check on how his cases turned out. It seems most of them involved children. I guess he wanted to know they came out okay. In the long run, I mean.”